Anxiety is hands down one of the top most uncomfortable and frustrating emotional experiences there is. It hijacks your brain and body against your will, and even when logic, reasonable thinking, and reality make sense… Anxiety still shows up and grabs the keys.
If you have had anxiety for a while now, you have probably done a ton of research, collected some tools, and tried just about everything. With some practice, you may have felt some improvement, and with time, you may have gotten to know your anxiety well. But that doesn’t mean you like it, and it definitely doesn’t mean you know how to get rid of it.
The problem with treating anxiety is that it is a symptom whose root cause is hidden, and a lot of the ways we seek to treat it exacerbate that root cause rather than resolve it. Think about the first time you were anxious or remember feeling anxious: how old were you? What was the predominant feeling? Fear? Usually, the answer is fear. So we assume that the solution to anxiety is to face those fears and to resolve the feeling of being unsafe. But for those of you who have chronic anxiety, or OCD, or intrusive thoughts, or chronic pain, o rumination… you know deep down that somehow, facing fears and working on a realistic assessment of safety, doesn’t seem to get to the bottom of it all. It keeps coming back.
So what is the root cause of most anxiety? It can be trauma, the result of neurodivergence and relationships, learning disabilities, or the stresses of daily life… But at the root of all those situations is the same issue: feeling alone and like we can’t handle what’s happening BECAUSE we are alone. Being alone with a big thing makes it bigger, too big.
Most people with anxiety developed it as a result of being alone with big feelings or overwhelming events at a young age. Their caregivers either missed the cues, were anxious themselves, or were the source of the overwhelm, either in their absence or in their stressful presence. Your young nervous system needed someone to be with them to make the world less scary because humans need connection to feel safe, not the absence of threat. In several studies, it has been found that a painful/stressful experience is perceived as less scary by those who aren’t alone while it’s happening. Something as simple as having a loved partnerhold your hand while you’re being shocked (for science) reduces the perception of the severity of the pain, thereby making the experience less overwhelming. Connection is the answer to anxiety, not trying to not be anxious.
How do we resolve that root cause? One effective way to bring a sense of connectedness into our inner world is to practice self-compassion, mindfulness, and regulation techniques. But the hardest part of all that is that we can become anxious about getting rid of our anxiety. The root cause resolves when we can feel connected to a safe part of ourselves and practice the hardest thing we can when we are anxious: acceptance.
If you want to keep reading, look for my post on The Secret to Kicking Chronic Anxiety in the Butt, Part 2.
